In March 2017, Marianne Hirsch delivered a keynote lecture for the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University’s Archives Make History conference, revised and published in differences as “Feminist Archives of Possibility,” in which she offers a fantasy of the year 2027 and the thriving multidisciplinary field of women, gender, and sexuality studies twenty-five years after the founding of the Feminist Theory Archive. She envisions a university course funded by a Pembroke Center grant, designed to study various collections of papers. Hirsch imagines all the files will be digitized and searchable online by this time, but the future students would still go to the archive in person, handling correspondence, syllabi, post-it notes and marginalia. Rather than seeking “authenticity” in these physical documents, the hope would be to engage them as sites of “potentiality, provisionality, and contingency,” as open-ended projects—invitations to join in the process of thinking with individuals and organizations, the possibilities they envisioned but did not actualize or pursue. Regardless of whether in-person access to these records is possible, the course would reflect on what has been excluded by the material practices of the archive as well as what has been preserved, seeking alternative sites and forms of collection. In the course of her keynote, Hirsch asks: What might one generation of feminist scholars and activists wish to transmit to later generations, beyond their published writings? What might that generation transmit accidentally, without intent or even awareness of transmission?
I also presented from my research in the archive at this 2017 conference. For the last several years, I have been researching the late feminist philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Teresa Brennan’s papers at the Feminist Theory Archive. I would like to share a bit about Brennan and my relationship to her archive before speaking about the holdings and ethos of the Feminist Theory Archive more broadly.
I never met Brennan, but after I got my first job at Florida Atlantic University (FAU)—where Brennan spent her mature career—she became not only an influential scholar for my work but an important person in my life. In part, this came from the loneliness of taking an academic job in a new state, but it was also that I saw in Teresa Brennan hope for what an academic life can do and be—through developing concepts and institutions but also new models of feminist kinship. I was lucky to eventually find community at FAU, but for a while, I worried what kind of life we could have, me and my cat in the Florida heat, days from anyone we knew. These worries subsided into new possibilities as I came to learn about Teresa and her cat Ptolemy, and the world she brought to fruition for a few glorious years at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Brennan was born in 1952 in Melbourne, Australia and died in South Florida in 2003, following a hit-and-run car accident late in 2002 that left her in an irreversible coma. While at FAU, Brennan founded a PhD Program for Public Intellectuals, which The New York Times then described as training not just scholars but interpreters of diverse publics, such as environmentalists, journalists, union organizers, or museum curators. Guest lecturers and visiting scholars to the program included Linda Martín Alcoff, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Susan Buck-Morss, among others. Concentrations in the program originally included gender studies, postcolonial theory, public policy, popular culture, and social movements. This program closed a few years after Brennan’s death and was later redesigned, but the innovation reflected Brennan’s own unique path into academia; she pursued a PhD in her mid-thirties after a decade of activist work in Australia and the Americas. Roughly a decade passed between her doctorate from Cambridge in 1992 and her tragic death, but in that time she published four monographs and edited two volumes. She was putting final touches on her fifth book, The Transmission of Affect (2004), which would become her most well-known. There, she defines “affect” as a transpersonal shift, such as the warmth of solidarity, the projection of judgment or introjection of shame and/or depression. For Brennan, affects name socio-historical forces into which we are born, and in and through which we must interpret.
Brennan should be prominent in what has been called the ‘affective turn’, an interdisciplinary revaluation of non-rational, embodied modes of awareness since the 1990s, but she is largely absent from The Affect Theory Reader, save for a few passing citations (37, 275, 283) that largely interpret her theory of transmission as a matter of contagion inattentive to power relations—as though affects simply float around and people haphazardly catch them on Brennan’s view. As I have argued elsewhere, Brennan’s concern for the socio-historical circulation of affects has more to offer than has been acknowledged insofar as the late capitalist tendencies she observed in the 1990s—vending machines, delivery, and other personalized, seemingly “instant” services—have skyrocketed since her death, with an ease of “favorites” pages and “swiping right” beyond what Brennan could have imagined in 2002.
In the introduction to Singing in the Fire, which includes a contribution from Brennan and was released shortly after her death, Linda Martín Alcoff recalls Brennan asking her, “Have you ever written precisely and exactly what you truly think and believe, without editing yourself down? Have you ever thought about writing not for a present-day audience but for the future?” I am grateful to Alcoff for remembering this line, which reads to me as an invitation for junior scholars like to myself to collaborate with the insights Brennan left behind. In my search through her twenty-two boxes, I have encountered Brennan in this open-ended and even “unedited” register, from early drafts and family photographs to the surprise of previously unknown literary and philosophical works: an autobiography in five parts, a “Play-not-for-Performance,” a proposal for a the photographic novel (which Brennan thought an ideal medium for psychoanalytic theory, with faces, quotes, and thought-bubbles), and an unpublished manuscript entitled The Age of Paranoia, which I address in a forthcoming article in differences.
What do I learn from looking through these typewriter pages, email correspondences, research plans, calendars, all this personal stuff? I wonder about my relationship to these files. The intimacy of my access to them feels at times undeserved, or more precisely like it risks the hubris of over-identifying or projecting my own ideas into what Brennan wrote. How can I do justice to the unfinished possibility of these papers, interpreting their significance without thereby smoothing over their open-ended dynamism? The Pembroke Center is a site of ongoing reflection about the value of these “unedited” moments. I hear this inquiry reflected in Hirsch’s hopes for a non-linear, rhizomatic relation to the “dust” of the archive, stretching from written to oral and other multi-media forms of keeping records.
Brown’s John Hay Library is a Carnegie Library, which means that use of these Special Collections is available to the public. Anyone who signs up for a free Aeon account can search through and request on-site and increasingly digital access to an impressive list of available collected papers. The Feminist Theory Archive Library Guide shows what is available online and/or on reserve in the Hay Reading Room. Looking through these materials, be sure to cite anything you want to reference later by Box number and Folder number, as you’ll need these for future publications.
The current holdings include those of Linda Martín Alcoff, Sandra Lee Bartky, Seyla Benhabib, Lauren Berlant, Ann duCille, Silvia Federici, Christina Sharpe, and Ewa Ziarek. Theorists who have agreed to donate their papers in future years include Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Penelope Deutscher, Lynne Huffer, Chantal Mouffe, Gayle Salamon, Chela Sandoval, Joan W. Scott, and Hortense Spillers. This groundbreaking collection of feminist writings is maintained foremost by Mary Murphy, Nancy L. Buc ’65 Pembroke Center Archivist, who selects and processes materials in collaboration with Pembroke Center Director Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, a Faculty Board, and colleagues in the Hay Library.
Of special interest to philosophers in the Feminist Theory Archive will be the collected papers of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) and its various Chapters. The effort that went into generating a stable archive for over four decades of organizing work is a good example of what Hirsch hopes to see maintained and explored in the future, and similarly, what this blog post hopes to promote today. Thus, in 2013, Chris Rawls and Sam Noll responded to FEAST listserv email from Joan Callahan (1946-2019), whose legacy Kate Norlock honored on this blog in June. Following an inquiry on the listserv from Marilyn Frye as to the preservation of SWIP papers, Callahan proposed that junior scholars might collaborate with herself, Ann Garry, and Alison Jaggar to preserve these documents in a prestigious archive. Joined by Sandra Harding, this group of six became the Feminist Philosophy Archive Project (FPAP). In 2015, the FPAP was awarded a $5000 grant from the American Philosophical Association to complete this project, which resulted in this permanent and public SWIP archive at Brown University. As Rawls and Noll recount, FPAP reflected on the purpose and the future audience of this archive in the process of constructing it. For these archivist-activists, the institutional archives of feminist philosophy present a material legacy of challenges to epistemic oppression in the field. The preservation of this work is uncontroversial in its value, arguably even the records of discord between members, insofar as these disputes remind us that we can organize through moments where our perspectives differ.
My hopes in writing this blogpost are 1) to spread the word about public access to the Feminist Theory Archive and 2) to encourage new research and activist efforts along the lines described above, as well as lines not yet named or conceived.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.
Lauren Guilmette
Lauren Guilmette is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elon University. She has articles on Teresa Brennan forthcoming in philoSOPHIA, differences, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. She is grateful to Pembroke Archivist Mary Murphy and to Brennan’s literary executors, Woden Teachout and Steve Brennan, for their support of her research.
